1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to personal tokens used for authenticating a user when such user accesses to a limited or a private resources equipment such as a mobile telecommunication network, a remote server storing secret data or even a protected area with limited physical access thereto.
2. Related Art
The mostly known device of this type is the IC card such as for example a SIM card (Subscriber Identification Module) or a credit card, but it can also be a USB key, a mass memory card, or any kind of token carrying some necessary credentials.
Such tokens are typically compliant with international standard IS07816.
Because of the resource limitation in SIM card, previous generation of SIM card usually can only work in single thread model, where only one SIM application can run at one time.
Later generation of SIM cards can work with multi-thread model by using a “Logical Channel” concept (using a different APDU parameter so as to indicate to use different threads). But this method has little acceptance because it raises compatibility issues between terminals and SIM cards.
Multi-thread model of SIM applications is more and more required. Particularly in recent transition of SIM application role from STK (SIM application toolkit) only, which requires only single thread model, to SCWS (Smart Card Web Server), which requires to handle several requests from web clients in parallel.